


Designation: Badass

by Nebulad



Series: Highfalutin Supermutant [3]
Category: Fallout 4
Genre: F/M, Gen, Sole!AU, X6 POV, meet cute
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-27
Updated: 2018-11-27
Packaged: 2019-09-01 05:56:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16759276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nebulad/pseuds/Nebulad
Summary: Micah Rozanov was a striking figure, which seemed counterintuitive to him. Certainly the wastes could not, and certainlywouldnot be kind to someone who looked so viciously, obnoxiously present. There was a mean glint in her eye, though, and a wry smile almost perma-fixed to her mouth: a face with a serious allergy to vulnerability, all in all. Maybe sheer leeriness had spared the wasteland.Of course, X6 only knew what she looked like because she’d meandered in to meet Doctor Ayo— he’d happened to be waiting to hear his next assignment.





	Designation: Badass

X6 believed several things that he thought perhaps his programming shouldn’t strictly allow. His refusal to report these anomalies were simply further proof that something wasn’t operating in the way intended by his design, but he chose not to linger on that. His thoughts weren’t harmful— simply pragmatic as the rest of him was.

He was a synth who did not believe in his own disposability.

_ Expendability,  _ yes. There were only a handful of people who were to be protected at all costs even living within the clean chrome walls of the Institute, and X6 was most certainly not among them. His death meant little in the bigger picture, but neither did he believe that he was simply  _ fodder.  _ None of the synths were, and frustrated humans dismantling models for little to no reason— they missed a spot, the scientist had a bad day, the synth took a second too long to respond— was wasteful and simply proved something else that X6 very firmly believed.

People were fucking idiots.

They were idiots who didn’t know the value of the people around them, which was probably worse than some dirt-farming settler just pissing around growing tatos and being just a general waste of life. It was one thing for X6 to look at that farmer and say he was doing absolutely nothing but  _ existing _ , and another for a scientist who  _ constantly  _ benefitted from synth labour dismantling one because their preferred food sludge had been discontinued.

The whole world was stuck in a vicious cycle of mediocrity. The people of the Commonwealth thought that survival was a victory no matter how shitty their lives were; X6 craved the praise of moody idiots like Justin Ayo because it would just ever so slightly reaffirm his personhood. It was degrading to look around at the scientists in SRB keeping an eye on synths like they were misbehaving children rather than people who performed valuable work. 

And he kept dragging his brethren back to the shiny chrome walls of their underground prison because if he had to put up with this shit, waiting for things to change from the inside, some Gen-3 with  _ limitless  _ potential wasn’t going to fucking waste that up in the Commonwealth eating dirt like a human. He wouldn’t allow it.

He also believed that he was alone in this— there were always extremes, but none of them suited him. Ayo wanted the synths to be deactivated on a dime; the Railroad wanted to help synths waste their lives like so many fucking humans; and the Brotherhood wanted to blast them all into a fine powder and scatter them to the wind. Neither the Railroad nor the Brotherhood provided him with a feasible alternative to watching his kin destroyed and rebuilt on a daily basis, wiped and refilled with new memories and sent out to sweep or worse, pretend to be a human, and so he stuck with what had the most potential.

The Institute wasn’t a lost cause, and the day Father founded his experiment— a project with a security level so high that he was fairly certain no contributing scientists remained within the Institute— X6 found that he wasn’t alone.

Micah Rozanov was a striking figure, which seemed counterintuitive to him. Certainly the wastes could not, and certainly  _ would  _ not be kind to someone who looked so viciously, obnoxiously present. There was a mean glint in her eye, though, and a wry smile almost perma-fixed to her mouth: a face with a serious allergy to vulnerability, all in all. Maybe sheer leeriness had spared the wasteland.

Of course, X6 only knew what she looked like because she’d meandered in to meet Doctor Ayo— he’d happened to be waiting to hear his next assignment. Despite his superior height and weight, built for taking on the Commonwealth, he seemed to be surprisingly good at going unnoticed. He stood there while she quizzed Ayo, and kept his face schooled neutrally even when she talked a circle around him, forcing him to contradict himself and expose his paranoia, finishing with a dry  _ well aren’t you just something else. _ On that note she left, off to see Robotics, perhaps.

Visibly flustered, Ayo told him that Shaun himself had a special task put aside that required not only his experience in the Commonwealth, but his tact. X6 didn’t ask where the doctor had gotten the idea that he was at all tactful, but he didn’t voice his concern or show any outward reaction to the strange choice of words. That was the sort of sloppy behaviour that got a man wiped and reset without a second thought.

He didn’t know why they were so afraid of artificial intelligence. Last time he checked, the Institute’s motto wasn’t  _ research to this line and then do whatever you can to prevent crossing it. _ Perhaps the morality of destroying the cafeteria workers became greyer when they knew for sure that the synth was  _ afraid. _

Unsurprisingly, he was tasked to travel with the Director’s pet project and ensure that she performed her task to the high standards of the SRB. Ayo trusted him, perhaps because he was so carefully neutral in the doctor’s presence. Not only was the man reset-happy, but he was also paranoid. The wrong twitch of the eye might convince him that his model is developing past preset parameters, and so X6 simply doesn’t move his eyes. 

It seemed to work.

. . . . .

Micah played her cards too close to her chest for X6 to get a proper read on her at first. The only notable thing he could gather was that she was in the company of a supermutant, and talked to it like it was a real person. When it displayed interest in killing the  _ tin man in skin suit,  _ Micah laughed and patted it’s stomach. “After all the effort he went through to give us a Raider camp?”

The thing played nice after that, and X6 decided that at least they didn’t have to worry too much about any dangers Micah encountered. The supermutant seemed loyal to near weakness, and she kept him well-equipped with a minigun that it looked like it hurt to hold. He obeyed her commands to the letter in battle, and when she ordered the beast to shoot the Raiders into a group, he had to admit that he was… curious.

“X6, be a doll and stand behind me,” she said, shaking out her wrists.

“Behind you, ma’am?” It wasn’t like him to question orders and so he did it, but his trigger finger twitched at the poor strategy.

“Gun safety,” she explained, and in her hands was the most dangerously improvised looking missile launcher— X6 took a step back just because that thing looked like it would recoil hard enough to send his face into the back of his head. He had no idea  _ how  _ she was going to shoot it— she had it carefully balanced on her shoulder and the mutant kept up a barrage of fire that distracted the Raiders— but she took a deep breath and pulled the trigger.

The ship the unfortunate group had been standing on capsized, but X6 supposed it didn’t really matter to the viscera confetti that the Raiders had become. The mutant beat his chest, turning his fire immediately to another group that was forced to crouch under the same cover. Their pathetic wooden walls, however, stood no chance against Micah’s missiles and another ship was flipped and whatever was left of the Raiders floated to the top of the water.

X6 abruptly realized that he hadn’t fired a shot in over two minutes, just watching this all happen. He raised his gun towards the main structure, and from his right watched Micah bring out the baseball bat she kept at her side once more. It was a game to her, he thought; what harm was a simple wooden stick in the hands of a person whom the wasteland hadn’t touched?

She roused him from his idleness with one of her characteristically flat smiles. “See the one on the balcony?” she asked him, pointing her bat towards the top of the main structure.

He did, and saw the Fatman aimed directly at their perch.

He fired, emptying his gun into the Raider until the Fatman tumbled overboard and into the water, followed by its wielder. Silence fell— those remaining would be weighing their options, while Gabriel tried to figure out a strategy. X6 felt better about their odds than he had coming in, taking a moment to loosen his neck and shoulders. “How’re you feeling Strong?” Micah called out over the scaffolding. The mutant beat his chest again.

_ “Strong just getting started!” _ he called back.

“And you, X6?” she asked, turning pleasantly.

“Ready, ma’am,” he said coolly, his fingers clenched against his gun.  _ He  _ felt a little like laughing, because  _ holy shit.  _ A missile launcher. Micah had approached him with a plain wooden bat and something large strapped to her back that he hadn’t even bothered to note because what were the chances that she had a  _ missile launcher? _

It was almost a shame that this was a recall mission. He would have liked to see where Micah could go, when she didn’t have a map to follow.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm making a game that is [here](https://nebulous.itch.io/manor-hill%22) for you to peruse, and [my blog is here](http://nebulaad.tumblr.com/).
> 
> This is an old draft but it didn't sit right with me that 1) I'd never done X6 fic even though I love him, and 2) Micah was out here with a fic about Strong, one about Nick, and none about her third amigo. An atrocity, truly. Observant readers will note I changed her last name, mostly because I could no longer remember why I wanted Micah to be Greek and thought that it'd be far more interesting for her to be Russian. Also I mean all in all, Micah's a goddamn synth because I can't be interested in the game anymore with the regular plot because Todd did a bad job.
> 
> So, Micah is kind of a sub-branch of Phase Three: Mankind Truly Redefined, a synth to infinitely replace the Director. As he says on the roof of CIT, she's an experiment and he considers her a success; he doesn't know she's flirting shamelessly with the other synths and trying to teach Strong how to cook.


End file.
